Shift from economic condition as basis to rights, identity, status (in Weber's sense)
Last week we met representatives of the Frankfurt School and C. Wright Mills. In the Frankfurt School we met the roots of what is sometimes called "cultural Marxism" — a set of ideas that extends Marxian ideas about class struggle into the realm of ideas, fleshing out the processes behind things like ideology and false consciousness. In Mills — he is writing in the early 1960s — we had a manifesto of sorts for an approach to sociology that could have meaning in the everyday life of real people. Mills exhorted us to use sociological analysis to re-recognize what had been taken as "personal troubles of adjustment" as social problems.
Before mid-twentieth century the dominant paradigm for thinking about social inequality and social conflict was economic well-being.
References and Further Reading
Wikipedia. New Social Movements
Kitsuse, John. 1980. "Coming Out All Over: Deviants and the Politics of Social Problems." Social Problems, 28,1.